Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Thursday, October 16, 2014

The Curious Case of NP and NEXP

NP (nondeterministic polynomial time) and NEXP (nondeterministic exponential time) are provably different classes by the nondeterministic time hierarchy. No surprise, given exponentially more time we expect to solve more problems. But the proof requires collapses at many input lengths and odd things happen when we look at the infinitely-often question.

We say a language L is in i.o.-C for a complexity class C if there is an A in C such that for infinitely many n, A and L agree on strings of length n (for all x of length n, x is in A if and only if x is in L). Straightforward diagonalization shows that EXP is not in i.o.-P.

However we showed a relativized world where NEXP is in i.o.-NP in a recent paper (Theorem 18).
The construction is not particularly difficult but rather surprising: There is a possibility that one can get exponential improvement for nondeterministic computation for infinitely many input lengths.

Also consider the following facts: NEXP is not in i.o.-co-NP by straight diagonalization. If NEXP is is in i.o.-NP then

NEXP is in i.o.-EXP

EXP is in i.o.-NP and thus EXP is in i.o.-co-NP (since EXP is closed under complement).

This is not an immediate contradiction since i.o. inclusion is not transitive, even though those i.o.'s happen at about the same length. You can't combine these relativizable statements to prove NEXP is not in i.o.-NP.

NEXP in i.o.-NP is not one of my most complicated relativization results, but definitely one of the strangest.